Supercomputers: The Next Generation – Cray puts burst buffer tech, Intel Haswell inside

Cray has new XC40 and CS400 superduper computers using Haswell processors and DataWarp burst buffer tech to keep the Haswell cores crammed with data to process. The XC40 goes twice the speed of the existing XC30, courtesy of its Intel Xeon E5-2600 v3 ("Haswell") processor, scaling past a million cores. The architecture …

[Michael H.F. Wilkinson]

Permission to drool, please?

Lovely computerssss, my preciousssss.

Sorry, sorry, I have taken my little pills, won't happen again. Now where was that advice form to send to our HPC centre for suggestions what to buy as the next big supercomputer.

[theblackhand]

Re: Permission to drool, please?

The same pills as the designer of the CS400 rack doors took?

[I Am Spartacus]

Does it run Minecraft?

Says it all

[Anonymous Coward]

I want one in my basement

to calculate how to win the lottery....

[Chemist]

Re: I want one in my basement

"I want one in my basement - to calculate how to win the lottery...."

You have an algorithm ?

[Captain DaFt]

Re: I want one in my basement

"I want one in my basement to calculate how to win the lottery...."

If you can afford one and its maintenance costs, why do you need to play the lottery?

[Fungus Bob]

Re: I want one in my basement

He never said anything about acquiring one *legally*...

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: I want one in my basement

If we're into illegal usage, how well does it mine, as in what coin suits your fancy. (To which I'd add does it offset OpEx?)

[xj650t]

Yes, yes, yes, very impressive

But will it run crisis at decent frame rates?

[JudeKay]

Re: Yes, yes, yes, very impressive

Indeed! Deeply remiss of us not to have asked Cray... http://regmedia.co.uk/2012/04/25/cry_3.jpg

[Andrew Newstead]

Very nice -

But they don't look as cool as the old school Crays did.

[circusmole]

That's right...

...there is nowhere to sit!

[Adam 1]

Re: Very nice -

Just whack bash on there. Then you can sit wherever you feel like.

/ducks

[samlebon2306]

And more pressure from Intel to not include AMD's Firepro in the mix.

[TechicallyConfused]

WTF

Where do you put the monitor, keyboard and joystick ..... And do you think I'd need to run a fractal on it to make Elite playable?

[Derek Kingscote]

Just Wait

You can have one on your desk in 40 years

Reason :

In 1975 the 80 MHz Cray-1 was announced and delivered 80 MFLOPS.

Wikipedia has an interesting history of the early Cray machines.

eg The new machine was the first Cray design to use integrated circuits (ICs). Although ICs had been available since the 1960s, it was only in the early 1970s that they reached the performance necessary for high-speed applications. The Cray-1 used only four different IC types, an ECL dual 5-4 NOR gate (one 5-input, and one 4-input, each with differential output),[3] another slower MECL 10K 5-4 NOR gate used for address fanout, a 16×4-bit high speed (6 ns) static RAM (SRAM) used for registers and a 1,024×1-bit 50 ns SRAM used for the main memory.[4] These integrated circuits were supplied by Fairchild Semiconductor and Motorola. In all, the Cray-1 contained about 200,000 gates.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Just Wait

Eh, in case you hadn't noticed, desktop computers haven't been getting much faster for the last ~6 years (when the first Core i3/i5/i7s were introduced).

[Destroy All Monsters]

Re: Just Wait

Once the mechanical nanocomputer comes up, you can have everything in one cm³. If you can afford the cooling and the electrical energy input. Unless reversible computing takes off big (but then you will STILL have to dump infocrap at some point), or the current political situtation continues for ANY LENGTH OF TIME.